


Here's How to be a Mother

by smug_albatross



Category: The Brotherband Chronicles - John Flanagan
Genre: Character Study, Family Relationships - Freeform, Gen, Lowkey Magic, attempted child kidnapping, attempted child murder, its off-screen and implied but like be aware, not by hannah stig is just very unlucky as a person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-24 08:22:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20702891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smug_albatross/pseuds/smug_albatross
Summary: Hannah does not know anything about being a mother. It will not stop her from trying.





	Here's How to be a Mother

Hannah’s labor lasts all night and into the morning. She nearly drops the baby when the midwife hands him to her, swaddled in a blanket and already squalling.

It’s only then, staring down at this tiny little boy she already loves so fiercely, that she realizes how little she knows about being a mother.

“Hello, Stig,” she whispers, holding him tenderly. He’s so very _small_ – she fears he might break.

_Stig Olafson._ It’s a good name, a strong name. Perhaps he’ll be a sailor, or a blacksmith, or a warrior.

“He has your eyes,” Olaf tells her that night, rubbing her shoulders like she asked.

“He has your nose,” Hannah responds.

Olaf laughs.

* * *

Children – especially babies – are difficult, messy, and often annoying. Hannah takes it in stride, for the most part; she’d raised her sister when she was barely more than a child herself. She cleans up his messes and feeds him and _very patiently_ fits him into a little coat and hat so he can see his first snowfall. He’s only outside for a few minutes, held securely in his papa’s arms, but he burbles happily for the rest of the day.

Stig is blossoming, rosy-cheeked and laughing as his mama sings him songs while she works or his papa tells him wild stories over supper. He’s too young to understand the words, waving his arms around when Hannah starts stamping her feet to the beat or Olaf starts imitating the dragons in his stories, but it doesn’t matter.

There are days when everything goes wrong, when Stig manages to paint the walls with his food or won’t stop crying no matter what Hannah tries, where she goes to bed wondering if she hasn’t made some terrible mistake, thinking someone like _her_ could raise a son.

There are nights when Olaf doesn’t come home until very late, the smell of strangers clinging to his shirt. She tells herself it’s the tavern, or the gambling house, and tries not to think about the last time they managed to do something together that _didn’t_ involve Stig.

(She finds out later it was the gambling house. For all his faults, Olaf is – at least – faithful.)

Stig is three when one of the neighbors gets married. Hannah and Olaf are invited to the housewarming party.

Hannah pulls the bride aside – Astrid is a pretty young thing, all freckles and long golden hair, her son the same age as Stig and hiding behind her skirts – and slips an expensive golden bracelet into her palm.

“I couldn’t –” the girl protests, “I mean – I don’t even have anything to wear it with –”

“It’s not for _wearing,”_ Hannah tells her and the girl’s eyes go wide. “Don’t put all your coins in one purse.”

(Across the room, Olaf is giving the same talk to the groom. Instead of a bracelet, Brejik receives a pair of pearl earrings.)

(Olaf is well-traveled. Hannah, a hundred times more so. The riches... were a side-effect.)

Olaf calls it a run-gift. Most people are given one by their family, but sometimes – sometimes that isn’t an option, for one reason or another.

Hannah just calls it common sense. She brought her _own_ run-gift into this marriage, thank you very much. It’s locked up inside their house’s foundations, so well hidden that anyone looking for it would have to rip up the whole house.

Things fix themselves a little bit after that. Olaf doesn’t stay out so late anymore. Stig still grows like a weed, but the food on the plate actually makes it into his mouth these days. Olaf has his crew and Hannah has her clientele – young girls who want to know who they’ll marry, boys anxious about their brotherbands, couples asking if they’ll have children. Sometimes, gnarled grandparents will hobble in and sit at her table, asking if their families will be all right after they die. (Hannah always says yes to those.) It’s not the kind of thing she’s good at, but she muddles through. What she can’t see, she intuits.

Then Ragnak becomes the Oberjarl and her clients dry up. The dull roar of magic that used to permeate every inch of Hallasholm dies down to a murmur. Hannah shuts her doors, counts her coin, and braces for a long winter.

It’s a _very_ long winter. The auroras dance in the sky and Hannah goes to see them. It’s a beautiful moment – her, Olaf, and Stig, marveling at the sky. Hannah’s back itches – she longs to feel those colors between her teeth again, but the sky holds no family for her. Here, in Hallasholm, she has a son, and that will have to be enough.

(It is enough.)

* * *

Stig is a loud child. His infant babbles turn to words early on. When he’s four, Hannah starts making him fold his own socks in half before she puts them away. He chews on them, so she teaches him how to wash them. He’s four, of course, so he doesn’t _learn_ – but she keeps teaching him anyway, until he does.

He also stops chewing on things.

When he’s five, Olaf starts staying out late again. She ignores it, the same way she used to, right up until people start following her home from the market and watching Stig as he plays in the snow.

She takes him to the market one day, when Olaf is ‘out’ (out where, he never says) and there are twice as many men in dark hats and bulky vests. Her claws itch under her skin – even Stig is quiet, picking up on his mother’s agitation. She longs to rip and tear and _smite,_ but she swore she wouldn’t trap her son in that life – so she picks him up and runs. Her feet dig into the slick, icy roads as their pursuers slide awkwardly behind them.

She slams the door behind her. Locks it. Superstition and old wives’ tales run as thick as blood in Hallasholm’s underworld. Nobody will break into a witch’s house.

“Mama?” Stig’s voice quavers as she sets him down.

Hannah takes a deep breath and holds it.

She doesn’t know how to be a mother. She only knows that she wants her son to be safe.

“Here’s how to break a grown man’s knee.”

She makes him practice until he doesn’t get it wrong.

* * *

The fight that ensues when Olaf comes home that night is earth-shaking.

Hannah is furious and frightened for her son, livid that Olaf would associate with people who trade in _children. _Olaf is equally furious at the accusations, denying that he had anything to do with it, but Hannah is no fool and she does not believe him.

He sleeps on the floor for a week.

When Stig is six, Olaf disappears into the night with a chest full of jewels. Hannah is left holding his debts and paying for his mistakes.

She has never been more furious in her life. She wants to track him down and throw him to the dogs herself – but Stig is six and she cannot leave him by himself.

Hannah brought her own run-gift into this marriage, or whatever shambles is left of it, and carves out bits and pieces of her hard-won loot into their greedy, grasping hands, sending them away with the most vicious curses she can think of.

Shadowy men still lurk outside her door. She forbids Stig to leave the house alone, to answer the door unless he knows who it is, and begins to teach him all she can.

_Here’s how to make bread. Here’s how to skin a rabbit. Here’s how to make stew._

_Here’s how to mend your clothes, to count your coin, to set a snare –_

_Here’s how to survive if I don’t come home._

Neighbor Astrid is too sick to help, still recovering from a stressful pregnancy and a difficult birth. Hannah sees her older son – Johan? Jesper? Something with a J – picking pockets at the marketplace, his face too thin for his age.

She does the math in her head and, slowly, turns away. She has her own boy to take care of. She can’t afford two.

Eventually, the men go away. The lessons never stop – _here’s how to butcher a deer, here’s how to do the laundry, here’s how to sharpen a knife._ Hannah never stops looking over her shoulder.

Her run-gift stays hidden.

_Here’s how to climb a tree, here’s how to throw a punch, here’s how to break a man’s arm –_

When Stig is seven, Hannah marches into Borsa’s office and formally annuls her marriage. Borsa looks at her with pity and she wants to claw out his eyes.

Stig comes home with scraped knees, bloody knuckles, and red eyes. _Here’s how to wrap a bandage, here’s how to fight dirty, here’s how to make sure they don’t get up –_

When Stig is eight, he comes home with a chipped tooth and blood around his fingernails and a rope burn around his throat. _Here’s how to ask for help, here’s how to see a threat before it comes –_

_Here’s how to break a man’s neck._

That night, while Stig sleeps, Hannah slips out the door with a knife up her sleeve and finds the men in dark hats and bulky vests who tried to take her son away.

* * *

Stig is twelve and angry and constantly fighting. Of course he is – he was _her son_ after all – but he is twelve and always outnumbered and Hannah had never taught him how to fight other boys. Only grown men with knives, and (bless him) Stig is smart enough to realize that the two situations call for different approaches.

Hannah couldn’t teach him how to fight his peers. She didn’t know how. So she taught him other things.

_Here’s how to keep your feet. Here’s how to keep getting up._

_Here’s how to make a friend._

Stig is twelve when he brings home Hal Mikkelson, both of them trying to pretend they weren’t stealing from the lobster traps. Hannah laughs and cooked the lobster Stig presented her, keeping one eye on Hal as he and Stig chatter animatedly at the table. She knows little about the boy – only that his father was Mikkel, son of Kjat the Silent and Eira Knifehand.

(Eira was a loan shark’s muscle and Kjat – with Kjat, the stories vary, but he always has blood on his hands.)

Hannah doesn’t know how much of their work they passed on to their son and grandson and daughter-in-law, so she cooks the lobster and watches Stig’s new friend carefully and _hopes_ that her son’s heart won’t be broken.

The next week, she hands him an axe and says _here’s how to fight a war._

* * *

When Stig is sixteen, Hannah watches him leave for brotherband training and hopes the instructors won’t undo all her hard work. She fights with a spear, not an axe, but the rest of it –

If he comes back less of a survivor than he left, Hannah might just have to burn down the city and start over.

(First he wins, then he loses, then he doesn’t come home at all – Hannah’s heart nearly stops until she finds the note he left, promising he’ll come back.)

(He does.)

* * *

When Stig is twenty, he comes home with a broken heart.

Hannah asks no questions, lets Hal explain in undertone, lets Stig cry into her shoulder over the woman he loved and watched die.

“It was not your fault,” she tells him, over and over again, until finally he believes it.

_Here is how to love again,_ she tells him, but it’s a skill she’s never mastered. She hopes her son can manage it.

When Stig is twenty-one, she sees him smiling at Hal over a pork mince pie and knows that he has.

(When Stig is twenty-one, his father walks back in the door and pulls the ground from underneath Hannah’s feet. She wants to cry, to hit him, to string him up by his tonsils –)

(She settles for shouting, and she has never been more grateful to have Thorn in her corner.)

How _dare_ he ask for Stig’s help (how dare he not ask _her,_ he _knows_ who she is, what she is, what she can _do –)_

(Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t ask.)

When he walks past her, following Stig and Hal, she digs her claws into his arm and swears to him that if he does not keep Stig safe –

If Stig does not come back, Olaf’s quest will be for nothing and he will live just long enough to realize it.

Thorn lingers behind as she glowers at Olaf’s retreating back. His smile is sharp and merciless and Hannah feels a matching one flash across her face.

(When they were younger, the world trembled at their feet. It’s been thirty-three years since _Wolfwind_ dragged him out of the wreckage of her ship, but he’s never forgotten where he came from.)

“Don’t worry, chief,” he tells her. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

“You’d better,” she replies.

(He does. The Stig who comes home is downcast, but unharmed.)

(Thorn tells him about the Byzantos boy who has Olaf’s blond hair and her lips thin. She is not angry that he’s moved on, but she is _furious_ that he would do so much for an Empress’s brat and nothing for Stig. They were _married,_ doesn’t that mean anything?)

When Stig is twenty-two, Hannah sees shadows moving in the mountains and tastes ash in the air. She takes her son aside and shows him the run-gift hidden in the baseboards.

“Just in case,” she tells him.

**Author's Note:**

> I _will_ put magic into this world and Flanagan can't stop me.


End file.
